Economic development, current events, travel, sustainable living, and fatherhood, all from an agrarian perspective

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

The United States and me: A torrid love affair. Part II: Reconciliation

In October
2011 we took our yearly trip to Chicago, and it snapped me out of my September
blues.The prior year we’d gone to the
US for the first time as a family; Caro had never been there before.Sammy had come along, but he was still in
utero, in big-as-a-house utero at his 6 months of gestation.That time in 2010 we’d gone in a balmy
Chicago September, trying to avoid the sweaty heat of summer, which Caro is not
that keen on, having grown up in the cool Andean highlands all her life.This time, in 2011, we were going a month
later, and in the process we’d get to see the start of a Midwestern
autumn.Another change from the prior
year (in addition to having a semi-walking son in tow) was that my
stepdaughter, Gabri, came along.She had
never had any interest in the US, but we had gotten her a tourist visa the year
before along with her mother, just in case.As we were getting ready for our trip in 2011, she asked us, “Hey, why
didn’t you invite me along?”We’d just
assumed she wouldn’t want to go, so I guess we had never asked her.At any rate, she ended up tagging along, and
this was a really special addition to our trip.

As always when
I’m to go back to the States after a year away, I was giddy and excited for a
week or two beforehand.In the airport I
was in high spirits, and I jaunted into Immigration just as I’d been jaunting
everywhere that day, especially pleased to have a notarized permission letter
for Gabriela to leave the country, signed by her father.I thought we’d foreseen every possible
administrative roadblock to taking our trip.But I was soon on the verge of tears, incredulous that they were giving
us a hard time because Sam only had a US passport.You see, my son was born in Colombia, which
automatically makes him a Colombian citizen, as his birth certificate
indicates.But by dint of his being the
son of a US citizen, he is also entitled to US citizenship, and I had gone
through the paperwork earlier that year to obtain his US citizenship
certificate and a US passport.I figured
the passport would be good for him to go anywhere in the world.

But not good
enough to get him out of Colombia.Apparently, as a Colombian national he must present a Colombian passport
to leave the country.The immigration
person explained that she couldn’t let Sam out of the country without a
Colombian passport.Normally we might
obtain this passport in an office in the airport, but it was a Saturday, and
the office didn’t open on Saturdays.The
other option would be to treat Sam as a US national who’d overstayed his
3-month tourist visa, which would entail paying a fine, but this was again
handled in an office that didn’t open that day.

I couldn’t
believe it.I was just dumbfounded,
thinking that either we wouldn’t be able to take our trip, or I’d have to go
without the rest of my family.And we’d
swallow a few thousand dollars, to boot.I tried to plead, to explain, to not get angry, but mainly I just stood
there with a bewildered look on my face as my wife Caro tried to reason with
the people.

After a few
excruciating, tense minutes, a supervisor came along and had mercy on us,
letting us go as long as we promised to get a passport for Sam as soon as we
were back in Colombia.We promised, and
I was again almost in tears of joy.I
know I’m by no means an oppressed migrant or anything, but the half hour of
uncertainty as bureaucrats decided the fate of our trip was a reminder of how
tough it is sometimes to navigate these multiple cultural interfaces and
identities.

The flight
was a breeze.Sam behaved well, and the
cabin pressure changes didn’t seem to bother him as they’d always bothered me
as a child.He played a lot with his
sister, and I just sat in my seat with a goofy grin on my face for most of the
flight.We’d gotten through the
gauntlet, and were now on our way to a good, safe place.

Caro was
once again surprised at how congenial the immigration people were in Fort
Lauderdale, not at all the image most Latinos have of menacing impersonal US
government institutions.Gabri shared in
her mother’s pleasant surprise, and I got a sappy, proud feeling to see the
“Welcome to the United States” video they show on a loop, with images of all
our best landmarks and traditions and general human warmth.

As always, I
enjoyed the Fort Lauderdale airport for the number of Haitians everywhere,
working, travelling, chatting on lunch breaks.Chicago has a sizeable Haitian populace, but nothing where you hear
Haitian Kreyol much on the streets, even in Rogers Park or Evanston, the main
enclaves.In Fort Lauderdale (or at
least in the airport) Kreyol is everywhere, and even people that speak to you
in English with no accent have nametags that say things like Patrice Laferrier.

My general
wide-eyed marveling continued once we were in Chicago.Our cab driver had a Nigerian name and
accent, and I started grilling him the way I always do these days when I am
freshly arrived in the States (when you live there, you forget how odd and
fascinating it is to have people from different countries all around you).It turned out he was Yoruba, and he got a
kick out of our telling him about certain Afro-Latino religions and asking
about the spirits he’d grown up hearing about.

Finally we
got to my mother’s house where, after putting Sam to sleep, we stayed up past
midnight catching up with my mom and eating homemade cookies.Once again I found myself back in the house I
grew up in, but in a different moment and a different stage in my life.Gabri needed something from the drugstore,
and it was wild to make the same 11pm walk down Waveland to the Walgreens that
I’d followed so many times in years past, now with my stepdaughter!

In general
it felt weird to have my child on the scene of my childhood.We would go places, and I’d tell Caro about
something that had happened to me in that place when I was fourteen or
something, and I realized I was now a father sharing my own childhood, my own
geographic origins, with my son. Better
said, I was sharing them with Caro as I talked up a storm, and frankly I felt
bad that I wasn’t addressing Sam more as he dozed in his stroller, but I
imagine he caught what I was telling about, even when I wasn’t speaking
directly to him. I’d never been in that
situation before, at least not in that way.Sam was hearing from me the stories of a distant time and an unknown
place.Of course I’d talked to him about
my past before, but not with the evidence right there in front of us.

I also
realized that every place in the city is a story for me.Every corner has some memory from years and
years spent walking around and doing things with friends and family.A corner I’d always turned down on the way
home from school, an alley I stationed myself in to park cars for Cubs games, a
house I went to a party at, a storefront that used to be something else.On a big chunk of the North Side, no block is
just a block to me—they all have memories attached to them.When I was a kid, I always loved Chicago, but
sometimes I felt as if my geographic surroundings were not “valid”, at least
not in the US popular imagination.I
didn’t grow up in a ghetto or some other place that had been mythologized and
made interesting by popular media, but I didn’t grow up in a bland suburb
either, where real, normal white middle class people were supposed to live,
according to most movies and songs and TV shows. Life as a white kid in the urban core was too
exceptional, too different from the rest of the US, to be meaningful on a
larger scale. Furthermore Chicago,
perhaps more than many other cities, has a collective lore that residents learn
as children.The World’s Fair, Al
Capone, John Dillinger, the Daleys, the Haymarket riots, and more recently the
destruction of housing projects and gentrification of lots of areas.As a kid, I sometimes felt that this canon
was at once provincial and bourgeois, too big and historical to connect to
directly, yet too small and local to be noble or inspiring.

But now as I
revisited Chicago after many years living elsewhere I felt even more tied to my
place of origin, aware of its influence on me.The stories I grew up with as a Chicagoan are just the real, local connection
to place I always advocate for in my development work, and my own personal
stories overlap with the larger contemporary events and even the historical
events that led up to them. I no longer
felt as if my idiosyncratic, authentic neighborhood were some anomaly or
statistically-insignificant blip in a standardized countrywide landscape of
strip malls and big front lawns.Whether
or not it was typical or “normal”, my childhood and the place where it
transpired were 100% real and normal for me, and if many people in the late-20th
century US didn’t grow up somewhere with a strong local identity, then that was
their loss, and not something for me to feel left out of.Each person’s unique, hyper-local reality is
different and interesting.

We squeezed
in a lot of sightseeing and other local musts.The Lincoln Park Zoo, Byron's Hot Dogs, various deep dish and stuffed
pizzas, the Pick Me Up café (I’m realizing as I write this list that a big part
of what I do when I visit the States is stuff myself with junk food).We visited Lane Tech, where I went to high
school, we went to my family’s house in Wisconsin to canoe and jump in leaf
piles, we ate at Culver's, then Sour Patch Kids and Cheetos at a gas station,
we went to an outlet mall in Kenosha or Racine, visited my aunt in a retirement
home, shopped at a small town grocery store, split wood, invited friends over
for parties, went to the Art Institute, rode the CTA, took walks in my
neighborhood (including the lovely Alta Vista Terrace), bought consumerist
stuff like computers and cameras that are pricier in Colombia.Again, it was odd to do these things from my
childhood and bachelorhood, but now with a child of my own.Especially to drive to Wisconsin from
Chicago, as if I did this drive all the time (which I guess I have, just not in
the past six years).Sam seemed right at
home though, not at all put off by the new surroundings nor hearing everyone
speaking in English.He loved meeting my
extended family, and he had no trouble sleeping with the El train running by my
house all night.The only difficult
adjustment for him might have been a lack of fiber.In Colombia we eat a lot of fruit and drink a
lot of juice.Even our staple foods,
like potatoes and plantain and cassava, have a certain amount of fiber in
them.So coming to the States, where
common fruits like apples aren’t that fibrous, and staples like bread and pasta
have had all the fiber stripped out, was hard on his digestive system.That said, I think we got off easy,
considering all the drastic changes we were exposing him to.

Gabri was
great throughout the trip.She helped
out a lot with Sam, even sleeping alone with him a few nights (these were the
first times Sam had slept in another room from us since he was born, I
believe).She and I went to a high-end
camera store on the semi-industrial Near West Side, where we were attended by a
very enthusiastic and knowledgeable camera expert, who gave us just what we
needed, at a good price.It seems he
initially assumed Gabri was my girlfriend or wife, and advised me to “take good
care of her”.This was a bit
embarrassing, but Gabri dealt with everything well, even through the language
barrier.(That said, in retrospect I
don’t think Gabri made much of an effort to speak English on this trip.She understands it pretty well after years
living with me, and I have the impression that she can string together
sentences decently, but she’s so shy about it that I really can’t be sure of
anything in terms of her English skills).Gabri’s helping my mom take care of Sam one night even allowed Caro and
me to go on a little date to an Indian restaurant on Devon.We got out pretty late, so the place we ended
up eating at was determined more by its being open at that hour than by the
promise of high culinary quality.The
year prior we’d eaten at a higher-end Indian place (where Caro was tickled to
be attended in Spanish by a Guatemalan busboy), and frankly this year the
restaurant had a distinctly Mafioso feel to it (and we’re pretty good at
detecting this, living as we do in a country full of Mafia fronts), but the
food was decent and we enjoyed the time alone together.

Another
highlight was getting some pants that fit.I am not a big clothes guy, and every year I go through a cycle where
I’m sick of my old clothes that don’t fit (too short, too tight, too big, etc.)
and want to replace them all, but then I balk at the idea of spending money on
clothes.On this visit we went to both
Marshall’s and a few thrift stores, and I was very happy to get some pants that
actually fit me.Of course within a few
months I realized that they didn’t really fit so well, or I’d lost or gained
weight to the point where they no longer did, and the cycle started all
over.But at the time I was very happy,
and felt much more dignified to be living life in well-fitting pants (which for
me, as a child of the urban 1990s, means comfortably loose pants).

Normally
when I am in the US to visit, I am initially reticent for the first few days
and feel out of place.I suppose it’s
natural; I’m used to living in one place, so going to another place is going to
entail a change in what I’m used to as far as customs and such.And the fact that the “new” culture where I
feel initially awkward is my own birthplace, with all the associations (both
good and bad) and emotional charges that that implies, makes me feel especially
weird and abnormal, because I should be more at home here than anywhere.At any rate, for the past eight years or so
that I’ve been living out of country, every time I go to Chicago I feel a
bitdepressed and out of place for the
first few days (even frustrated or angry at the problems in our country), and
thereafter I feel happy and at home.Likewise, when it’s time to leave again, I feel bad and somewhat
maladapted when I first return to my place of residence.This too soon passes.

On the trip
in 2011 I didn’t go through this process as drastically as on other
occasions.Unfortunately though, at one
point early in our trip I helped my mother for a party she was organizing with
some friends, and it fell during my maladapted time.It also happened that there were a fair
number of people my age at the party, and they were now living as young
professionals in Chicago.Given my
predisposition to melancholy at that moment, I started thinking to myself that
I was somehow inadequate, not as classy as they were.They had grown up in Chicago, just as I had,
and had even gone to some public schools, as I had.But I guess that because they ran in
different social circles, and many went to Catholic high school, I invented
this whole story in my mind that we were separated by some big cultural
divide.This was of course pure
nonsense, but it was compounded by the fact that I was serving everyone during
the party, so I felt even more as if I were somehow of an underclass.In my grey mood, I even fixated on how
relatively short I am in the US.I have
become accustomed, in an adolescence at a high school full of short immigrants’
kids, and later on in my adulthood in other, shorter countries, to being the
tallest guy around, and that bolsters my self-confidence, make me feel
special.But once back in the Midwestern
United States, I’m just of average height, at least among white males my
age.It’s like Superman going back to
Krypton and being just a regular Joe.

Anyway, all
this silly drama never manifested itself except inside my neurotic mind and in
my whining to my wife.Soon thereafter
we had a nice evening dinner with my cousin, and I felt at home again, in a
place where I belonged (and at peace with my not-so-exceptional height).

By the end
of our trip I was sad to leave the US.I
reflected that just one week isn’t enough time for me to visit home; I need longer
to bask and let things sink in, and then come to terms with my leaving
again.Furthermore, at that time it was
looking as if we’d soon be returning to live in the States, so I had spent much
of the trip dreaming and getting excited about possible projects, businesses,
gardens to plant.Now I would have to
put all those on hold once again and return to my regular life in Colombia.

On this trip
I’d tried to get my mother’s attic in order.This has been my bedroom since I was eight or so, and now it has all my
assorted papers and books and memorabilia.Since I’ve lived abroad I’ve attempted to slowly get this space
organized, chipping away at piles of things to put them in boxes or the
crawlspace or the garbage can.Yet again
on this trip, I didn’t get done as much as I would have liked to, and so I had
to leave some piles untouched.I pondered
melancholy that most of what I left would not move from its place for a year or
so, as it hadn’t moved in the prior year until we came to visit.Since our prior visit we’d had a baby, new
jobs, deaths, new living arrangements, yet in a corner of North Side Chicago,
in my mom’s attic, those papers and books had remained still and stoic through
it all.Who could know what the next
year would bring, as my attic piles remained stolid and indifferent?

Despite my
sadness at leaving Chicago, I was very happy that Gabri and Sam had gotten to
see my hometown (and Caro to visit once again).We’d done a lot of typical regional things, and I for one enjoyed the
nippy fall weather (Sam, on the other hand, was furious whenever the freezing
wind would stir up and whip his face).I
was wistful on the plane (at least the time I was conscious after our 2am
wakeup), and I expected a few days of mopeyness as I readjusted to life in
Colombia.But to my surprise, when we
had landed and my father-in-law picked us up, I became happy to be back in
Bogota as I watched the cityscape pass by our car window.I snapped back into my everyday mode and
looked forward to pending tasks at work.I had found peace once again with my homeland after years of on-and-off
disillusionment, but I was also content with my adopted home in the Andes.